Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Counterfeiters, The
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 23 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 16 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Crime | Drama | War
Written by:
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Adolf Burger
Directed by: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Release Date:
Theatrical: February 22, 2008
DVD: August 5, 2008
Running Time: 98 minutes, Color
Origin: German
Summary
RATING: R for some strong violence, brief sexuality/nudity and language
Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, and Devid Striesow
The true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and bohemian who was in captured by the Nazis in 1944. He agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeiting operation set up to finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit-money scam of all time. Over 130 million pounds sterling were printed under conditions that couldn't have been more tragic or spectacular. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to use the duds to flood the enemy economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. "Operation Bernhard" was born. Prisoners were brought to Sachsenhausen from other camps to implement the plan, and professional printers, fastidious bank officials, and simple craftsmen all became members of the top-secret counterfeiter crew. They had a choice: If they cooperated with the enemy, they had a chance to survive as first-class prisoners in a "golden cage" with enough to eat and a bed to sleep in. If they sabotaged the operation, a sure death awaited them. For the counterfeiters, it was not only a question of saving their own lives, but also about saving their conscience as well... (Sony Classics)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: All the Queen's Men Anatomy Anatomy 2
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music--seductive, insolent, triumphant.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Stan Hall
While terrific entertainment, The Counterfeiters fails to stir the soul.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
It is always intriguing as it follows the arrest and captivity of Salomon Sorowitsch (the terrific Karl Markovics), one of Germany's leading counterfeiters.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
From an historical perspective, the story is interesting because it shows a different side of the war than what we're used to observing in motion pictures.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Though extensively fictionalized -- Sorowitch is loosely based on the notorious, larger-than-life forger Salomon Smolianoff; Herzog on SS officer Bernhard Krueger, after whom the operation was named.
Read Full Review >Variety Eddie Cockrell
The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ella Taylor
At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Adam Bernstein
Though swiftly paced, The Counterfeiters convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhuman conditions
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.1 (out of 10) based on 16 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Jay H. gave it an8:
Amazing story, very well directed with an excellent cast. Fine attention to period detail. Moving as well as disturbing. The writing is first rate. Very fascinating, always interesting.
Mike D. gave it a10:
Riveting from start to finish. I thought other foreign-film Oscar nominees were worthy of winning and was surprised to see this one win, but that was before I had seen it. It deserves the Oscar, and your $10 to see it.
Roland B. gave it a5:
note to entertainment weekly: doesn't take sides....? guessed we watched a different movie. personally i thought this was your brand name holocaust movie with all the tricks we are used to implemented to manipulate us and make us sad without offering anything innovative or new to say about the already well explored subject.
Marc K. gave it a6:
Nothing new. Doesn't break any new ground. Rather predictable. If you've seen "Schindler's List" or "The Pianist," you've seen this one.
Susan M. gave it a10:
This movie was incredibly well-done. It's clearly better when Europeans make WWII films - they do it much better than Hollywood.
Chad S. gave it an8:
A "mercy f***"; it's the first bit of English that an Auschwitz survivor named Meyer Maslow learned when he first immigrated to the states, in novelist Francine Prose's "A Changed Man". Maslow, the leader of an Amnesty International-type organization, used the holocaust for sex with college coeds when he taught at an American university. Concentration camps and post-war sex collude in "Die Falscher"(American title: "The Counterfeiters"), too, as a hooker waives her services rendered charge after she sees the identifying markings on Salomon Sorowitsch's arms that denote the Russian's first-hand experience with crematoriums and other Nazi iconography. Maslow, for all we know(Prose keeps her novel in the present), could've been a Nazi collaborator like Sorowitsch(Karl Markovics), who insists that the prostitute take the money, because the counterfeiter knows he doesn't deserve a mercy f***. Like "Schindler's List", a war profiteer(August Diehl as Adolf Burger) incidentally saves the lives of a few Jews by putting them to work, but unlike the Steven Spielberg film, there are no clear-cut heroes to put a face on Operation Bernhard. Salomon is like the marathon runner who walks throughout the race, but scores the free t-shirt, nevertheless. Salomon was "there", without really being there, which makes "Die Falscher" unique from other movies about the forced labor camps. This time around, the morally compromised only goes through the motions of expelling his bumpy past. Listen closely to what Salomon tells the whore after his self-abnegating exorcism.
Fantasy gave it a10:
Excellent! Most worthy of the praise and honors it ireceived.
